Governments can fail their people in three basic ways, as Americans are ruefully discovering. Governments can fail to deliver vital services. They can deliver them but do it poorly and expensively, while favoring political cronies. And they can crunch the people under foot as government officials accumulate more power with less accountability.

Americans now say their government is failing them in all three ways, according to recent polls. Voters are angry — and with good reason. Surveys show that trust in government has sunk to historic lows and is still dropping. Election after election has been dominated by the same theme: "Throw the bums out." (It was political consultant David Axelrod's genius to put a smiley face on that sentiment in 2008, calling it "hope and change.") And yet the bums mostly stay put, thanks to gerrymandered districts and hyperexpensive campaigns, which strongly favor incumbents and wealthy candidates. The result is a growing crisis of confidence, striking governments at the city, state and federal levels.

Consider the "failure to deliver services." Every government's most basic service is to ensure public safety. That responsibility is mostly a local matter: keeping our neighborhoods safe. Winnetka and Hinsdale are doing just fine, thanks, but we are failing badly in our worst urban neighborhoods. Innocent citizens must live in constant danger from gang violence, drug sales and drive-by shootings. No local government can cope with the fundamental problems: the breakdown of family structure, poor education and lack of jobs. But Washington has made those a priority for half a century and spent multiple trillions on them. Meanwhile, dangerous neighborhoods desperately need more policing. Cities can't afford it. Although local tax revenues are generally up, the extra money is already pledged for retired workers' pensions, not for new police and firefighters.

The breakdown of order is increasingly obvious at the national level, too. The most recent, and disturbing, example is the inability (or political unwillingness) to secure America's borders. Whether you call the influx "illegal" or "undocumented," people are streaming across the southern border. The numbers are so large that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is having difficulty housing them. Whatever you think about immigration reform, it is impossible to argue that laws are being enforced and public order maintained.

When the government does provide public services, the quality is often dreadful. The poster child for poor, expensive services is public schooling. How bad are our K-12 schools? Bad enough that neither President Barack Obama nor President Bill Clinton could find a single one in Washington good enough for their own children.

The basic problem is not money. In real terms, we have doubled spending per child since 1980. If you multiply the spending per child times the number of children in each class, you'll find each classroom generates a quarter-million dollars or more in revenue. Where is all that money going? Certainly not to our best classroom teachers, who make slightly more than city bus drivers. Some of the money is going to lumbering school bureaucracies, some to poor teachers (who are virtually impossible to fire), and plenty to pensions and health insurance. Where it is not going is to fund top-quality instruction in small classes.

One reason the education system is so bad is that public schools don't face stiff competition. Until recently, it was almost impossible to get rid of terrible schools anywhere. That's true of nearly all public services. Public schools face the same dog-eat-dog competition as the Department of Motor Vehicles. Just try to get your driver's license anywhere else. No competition inevitably means bad service. That's as true of public schools and the DMV as it is of Comcast.

Given these manifest failures, you might expect some humility from Washington or City Hall. Just kidding. What we get is the arrogance that accompanies power — power that is increasingly centralized, bureaucratized and unaccountable. That was most apparent in last week's testimony from John Koskinen, head of the Internal Revenue Service. This politically connected bureaucrat, who presides over an agency that has already admitted serious wrongdoing, could barely contain his contempt for the peoples' representatives. They were demanding accountability. What they got instead was a sneer, evasive answers and a sarcastic promise to produce the missing emails of Lois Lerner, the former director of the IRS division that oversaw tax-exempt groups.

The IRS is not alone in its problems, or its arrogance. We've seen the same at the Department of Health and Human Services, the State Department, Veterans Affairs, the Environmental Protection Agency and many more. They are symptoms of a government that is overstretched, unaccountable, and, in far too many ways, failing its people.

Charles Lipson is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.